Innovations vs the Consumer.
I had an interesting discussion with a group of engineers about an innovation for the next generation of PCs, it's reasons and effect on consumers.
The story begins about 5 years ago. A major cause of consumer complaint was the tangle of wires behind their computer, with 9 or 24 pin serial, and parallel ports, and video ports that looked a lot like the 9 pin serial. There was also the problem of adding new items to PC, which meant opening up the box and plugging in a variety of cables and different power connectors. A consortium of PC OEMs, Intel, Microsoft, and others looked into the problem and decided that it would be advantageous is PCs had a USB port for low speed device connection and a high speed "firewire" connection. So far so good.
There are differences between USB and firewire besides their speed and power ratings. In particular the firewire is a complete protocol which allows communication between like devices (i.e. two firewire enabled devices can talk to each other). USB requires a master-slave arrangement. When Sony developed a chipset that implemented a complete firewire solution it got Microsoft and Intel worried. If devices could talk to each other, such as a camera to a disk drive, and not require a PC in the middle, then the whole PC centric plan was threatened.
Now comes the innovation. Together Microsoft and Intel developed the USB 2.0 specification. This is a higher speed USB (but not as high-speed as firewire). Most important it requires a Master-slave communication arrangement (and windows 98 is the only current master). Intel assured that firewire would only be available as a PCI add-on, thereby negating much of it's speed. The goal is to is to grab enough of the high speed periferals that firewire will remain marginalized.
What does this mean to the consumer. It means that these USB ports which are supposed to allow the connection of any USB periferal will now work with some (if the are low speed USB 1.0) or maybe with others (if they are USB 2.0). The cables and connections may look the same, but the 1.0 specified cables will not carry the higher frequency USB 2.0 traffic. High speed USB 2.0 devices can be hooked through a USB 1.0 hub (like a keyboard or monitor hub) but the device won't work. In short the consumer gets voodoo and frustration under the banner of an innovation. All this to be sure that you can't connect your scanner to your printer without a PC in the middle.
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